LA2DAY dropped by the ever-active showroom of Sigmar Berg of +Beryll in Santa Monica to talk about art. On the last visit, we talked with Berg about his background in the fine arts, architecture, and how he applies these fundamental principles to both his design work and his photo-scape paintings - powerful, visual narratives that can be said to be alchemical in their bursting energies of drama, light, color and form. Berg's first solo show in Los Angeles will be up June 7th at Ambrogi Castanier Gallery in West Hollywood. More to come on this!

Today's visit focused on a young artist, Clemens Wolf, from Vienna, whose work Berg and his wife and business partner Petra are passionate about and actively promoting. His work is installed for a show "POINT OF VIEW" that opens with a reception this Friday May 2 at the +Beryll showroom.

At first, the urban-born images of artist Clemens Wolf appear to be war-scapes of apocalyptic aftermath. Some paintings appear covered in the fallout of disaster, white ash, devoid of the blood of human life that with hope and aspiration dreamed up and built these now looming ghosts of crumbling architecture. But this is Vienna, far from today's war zones, and the artist's home base.

One such work depicts a Beaux Arts style once-glorious facade, a grand music hall. City laws of preservation prohibited this building from being torn down but it was nonetheless left to slowly, if not romantically, decay. Inside, a grand piano remains center floor untouched but by many summers and winters of exposure from the rotting roof.

Wolf works in cut paper, oil, and asphaltum -- a medium that even when thinned feels both slick and lustrous, the viscosity of blood. Process-wise, Wolf projects a photo image onto paper, cuts it out, and in a companion piece uses it as a mask. This reverse-image feels to be shot in infrared, through the night vision glasses of a soldier scanning a shadowy urban landscape for snipers. Again, the sense of war. But his work is less about what ominous potential lurks in buildings gaping with black holes. They are more about inevitability, an optimism that once was, beauty lost, remnants of which are sectioned off behind chain link fences. The question is: are we inside the imprisonment of decay? Or outside looking in? The feeling is that we are both on the inside and outside and there is small relief on either side.

On another level, the work of Wolf makes apparent the failed vision of social-utopian architecture, the urban experiments of architect LeCorbusier to ‘educate' the common people to the grand ideals of architecture by expecting them to live orderly lives within buildings that dictate their patterns of movement. "This didn't work," said Berg. "People in Paris don't want to park in a garage under a building. They wanted to park where they want, on a lawn, under a tree."

No, you can't change human nature, and that is the nature to grow, move, create, destroy - and change. Maybe it is the work of artists as visual recorders to remind and show us that -- so we don't forget who we are by where we have been.

"POINT OF VIEW" by CLEMENS WOLF at +Beryll Corp. Opening reception Friday, May 2, 6-9 p.m. 908 Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica. 

T: 310.393.3220

www.beryll.com